Never mind the flying cars

[torquill]

It's the 21st century. You know what I expected science to have given us by now?

1) A telephone that doesn't make me feel like I'm on one end of a pair of tin cans connected by string. We have amazing digital audio equipment and pretty darn good data compression, driven by tiny yet high-powered processor chips. If I can get high-quality streaming radio over my 802.11 wifi connection, why the hell can't I get a phone (and corresponding network) that actually sounds like a human voice rather than Charlie Brown's schoolteacher?

(Don't tell me it's the limitations of the existing network -- even full quality cell-to-cell calls would be a tremendous selling point, and wouldn't touch the old copper wires or switchboards. Have any of the phone cariers even muttered about it? No.) (Also: Skype is computer-based, and therefore counts more like a radio station for the sake of this argument. I want to be able to use a phone, not a full computer with headset and net connection.)

2) A bathroom fan that's quieter than the engine of an F-16 for less than 3 grand. (Let's not get me started on vacuum cleaners.)

3) A comfortable, reliable toilet. No, really. When you think about it, we're really only a step or so up from the hole cut into the seat of the ol' shack out back (or a hole in the ground, for those in Asia). We've made the hole prettier, and cleaner, but the average toilet is still a) cold on winter nights, b) not even close to ergonomic (how often do you get numb feet after a few minutes?), and c) touch and go when it comes to heavy work. You can buy warmed seats (for more money). You can buy high-pressure toilets (for a lot more money). I've heard that you can even buy an ergonomic toilet from Japan (for a *ahem* crapload of money), or one of the "ergonomic" seats which really are just trying to put lipstick on the pig. None of this helps you when you need to pee at the train station, and there it is: the icy-cold, hard, uncomfortable standard. Which is probably clogged anyway.

Spider Robinson touched on the last point (in "Callahan's Secret"), but it's one I had already been thinking about for a while. It's something everyone uses, every day. Modern engineering is amazing stuff. When are we going to get over our Victorian prudishness and actually design a good one?

Comments

[knaveofhearts.livejournal.com]

Someone on lily (bmw I think) replaced his bathroom fan with a much quieter version, and that lasted about a week until he realized that part of a fan's job is to *create* sound to allow folks not currently in the bathroom to suspend their disbelief at what actually goes on in there.

[luna-torquill.livejournal.com]

That is a good point. However, the sheer noise created by the particular set of frequencies made by most fans is horrendous. There must be a better solution than having the sound equivalent of a leafblower racketing overhead. Chimes? Water sounds? (There is a Japanese toilet I read about which makes the sound of water running at the touch of a button, as an alternative to embarrassed Japanese ladies who would flush almost continuously to mask the sounds.)

I realize I'm especially sensitive to certain upper-range frequencies, but I can't be the only one bothered by this.

[foogod.livejournal.com]

None of these are the failures of modern technology that you make them out to be, actually. Every single one of the things you're talking about do exist and are in use today. We have designed them. We have invented them.

They just cost more money. And, frankly, they cost more money because they're not important enough to everyone else to make them cost less money. If you're not willing or not able to spend the extra money for them, that's not technology's fault. If anything, blame capitalism.

The assumption that just because we can invent something that everyone will automatically be gifted with it free of charge is the real folly of all those 1950s-era "world of the future" videos. Reality has never worked that way, and it never will.

And, for the record, my cell phone audio quality has always been fairly good, and nothing like tin cans and string, in my opinion. Likewise with my desk phone at work (can't speak to landlines at home, since I don't use them). Had it occurred to you that maybe your phone's just crap?

(FYI, it is possible to get regular phone-type handsets that use Skype (over 802.11) now, so you don't need to be tethered to a full computer setup to use it. I've never tried them (or Skype in any form, actually), so I can't speak to the quality, though..)

[luna-torquill.livejournal.com]

Evidently I need to use your phone sometime, because I have never run across one -- land-line or cell -- that has anything close to the clarity of talking to someone who's in the same room. It never seems to matter how fancy the phone is... the consonants are always blurred.

And apparently I should have ranted about society rather than technology, as clearly (given what you're saying) this is all a colossal failure of marketing, which is part of what draws interest to innovations enough to bring their cost down to a reasonable level through economies of scale, which is the real-world alternative to the 1950s "free lunch" assumption (which I supposedly made). Sorry to have poked at your faith in human ingenuity.